Best Non-Video Baby Monitor Under $100 - No Static, No Interference, Great Features

You want a baby monitor that will let you enjoy the time your baby is peacefully sleeping and won't drive you crazy with static! Trust me on this. | Source

You Never Cared a Lick About Baby Monitors... Until They Are All You Care About

I never gave baby monitors a second thought until I had kids. I noticed them in the background at houses of friends who already had kids, but that was it. I sort of figured they were just standard issue once you became a parent. Maybe one just magically showed up at your door. How wrong I was.

As I was nearing my due date for my first child, the one big purchase looming on my list was the baby monitor. I had thought about getting it a few months before, gone on Amazon to survey my options, and ended up curled up in a ball in the corner shuddering. It seemed there were a million decisions to make about a monitor, and a million possible wrong choices to make. Even the best monitors had complaints. Video or not video? DECT techology? What the heck is that? Why did two that looked exactly the same to my untrained eye cost $40 different? In the face of all of this, I simply gave up.

Then the story gets worse - I bought a cheap monitor. It crackled and had random static all the time. I am ashamed to admit that we put up with this for three years!!! Once the kid was born we were thinking about so many other things and simply didn't have our wits about us enough to take the probably 2 minutes it would have taken to buy a better one. We only got a better one (spoiler alert - the Phillips Avent) once we had our second kid! This is why I write this article now - I hope to save others from our pathetic fate.

This is actually not a hard decision - just buy the Phillips Avent and go do something fun with the time you were going to waste researching baby monitors. Unless you want a video monitor - then go find another article, and good luck to you. If you want to know a little more about why you should get this monitor, read on.

Superiority Over Similarly Priced Monitors

The monitor we had for years that we really didn't like because of all the static and interference was a mere $30 less. I would gladly have paid $5 a night to make the stupid thing stop making random crackling noises, and I can attest that it was many many more than 6 nights that I felt that way. My point is, I should have sprung for the slightly more expensive monitor. This is not the time to save $20 or $30 - we're talking about enjoying the rare moments your child is sleeping peacefully without your assistance! Who can put a price on that?

The one we had was the Sony Baby Call monitor and it's currently listed around $50 on Amazon. It has 3 stars. It is the king of static. Don't do it.

Another we checked out was the VTech Communications Safe and Sound monitor, currently $40. I have also heard bad things about this one, but it does have 4.5 stars on Amazon from 179 reviews. Maybe worth checking it if you insist on trying to save money on this.

Other Perspectives?

I would love to hear if others have a similar experience with monitors, or if anyone wants to make the case for getting a video monitor. I'm also curious if others use the two-way communication feature more often than we do (hardly at all). Please share any thoughts in the comments!

Comments

No HTML is allowed in comments, but URLs will be hyperlinked. Comments are not for promoting your articles or other sites.

sending

Author

twoseven 4 years agofrom Madison, Wisconsin

healthylife2 - Thanks for the comment! It's pretty funny what we will put up with as parents when we don't have much time or energy to fix them! Maybe your model could have been used for some top secret spy work :)

Healthy Life 4 years agofrom Connecticut, USA

This will be so helpful because trial and error is the best way to learn. I can't even remember what model I used but it did have interference which can be a little interesting. I could hear entire conversations in other homes.Voted up!

Author

twoseven 4 years agofrom Madison, Wisconsin

hawaiianodysseus - Thank you for the very kind comments! I hope this will save other parents some of the static grief that I experienced for years! It will be fun when I have adult children to look back and think about how much this stuff mattered to me - I suppose there will be a few more complicated things to think about with adult children!

Hawaiian Odysseus 4 years agofrom Southeast Washington state

Professionally researched and written, yet presented in a contemporary reader-friendly style. Nicely done, twoseven. I think a lot of parents will be saved a good deal of grief from having read this piece. Thanks for sharing...and for evoking memories of when my adult children were tiny infants. Have a great weekend!